During a production process, objects such as glass bottles typically go through an annealing oven to take all of the internal stresses out of the bottles. Glass, for example, is made soft by heating and then slow cooling to eliminate internal stresses. Such objects are still somewhat fragile and can break or crack rather easily when subjected to a rather moderate external force.
On the other hand, during a production process, objects such as glass car windows may go through a tempering process to deliberately set up stresses in the window. Such a tempering process allows the window to better resist impact forces to help prevent the window from failing. Even when the impact forces are large enough to damage the window, the window fails in a safer, more graceful manner. For example, the window may crack but will not shatter and spread glass shards all around.
Tempering and annealing are two opposite extremes that can be achieved when producing, for example, glass or glass-based objects. However, it is often desirable to produce an object having a certain characteristic parameter (e.g., a “hard” object” or a “hardened” object) which is between the annealed state and the tempered state to make it stronger. Glass bottles, for example, may be hardened by cooling the bottles in a particular manner when they come out of the mold as described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,309,290 to Aksomitas entitled “Cooling Nozzle for Tempering Hollow Glassware”.
The benefits of such hardened objects are clear for the glass container industry. First of all, the consumer will not be able to accidentally break a hardened glass container as easily. In addition, today, the speed of glass container processing lines (e.g., a bottle filling processing line) are often limited by how easily the glass object will break.
For example, if glass bottles are traveling down a filling line and a bottle gets jammed, then a next bottle coming down the line may crash into the jammed bottle causing one or both bottles to shatter if the next bottle is traveling too fast. Therefore, the speed of such processing lines are deliberately limited today in order to avoid such catastrophic crashes. However, if the glass bottles can be hardened, the speed of the processing line could be significantly increased, generating improved processing efficiencies.
However, when producing many glass objects, such as glass bottles or jars, using a particular hardening process, it is often difficult to determine if any particular glass object has been properly hardened, or if the hardening process is deviating from a specified range. For example, if a glass bottle is hardened improperly such that unbalanced stresses are set up within the bottle, then a very minimal external force experienced by the bottle may cause the bottle to catastrophically fail (e.g., shatter or explode). Similarly, if a glass bottle is not properly hardened, the bottle may end up being too soft and, therefore, not much better than an un-hardened bottle.
Therefore there remains a need in the art for a fast and convenient way to efficiently determine a characteristic parameter (e.g., “a hardness”) of an object (e.g., a glass bottle), particularly as the object travels along an automated processing line (e.g., a bottle manufacturing line) with other similar objects.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.